Uniformly compressing mean curvature flow

Abstract

Michor and Mumford showed that the mean curvature flow is a gradient flow on a Riemannian structure with a degenerate geodesic distance. It is also known to destroy the uniform density of gridpoints on the evolving surfaces. We introduce a related geometric flow which is free of these drawbacks. Our flow can be viewed as a formal gradient flow on a certain submanifold of the Wasserstein space of probability measures endowed with Otto's Riemannian structure. We obtain a number of analytic results concerning well-posedness and long-time stability which are however restricted to the 1D case of evolution of loops.